The Children Speak: The World is Your Lobster

I have to say, I could get used to these short weeks. Last week was a very laid back week for me. The Bank Holiday weekend saw the house filled with children and grandchildren, the latter bursting with energy and happiness. The house was alive with laughter, noise and movement. Goats were fed, eggs were collected, piano, guitars, and drums played, a walk or two on the beach and of course chocolate Easter eggs. It was fun. It was happy times.

Tuesday and Wednesday were days spent walking or gardening in the most welcome sunshine. Both are my favourite activities. The only downside being a couple of virtual meetings requiring a shirt to be worn and hair tamed by a bobble. Thursday was a busy day at my hospital. It was a good busyness and it felt great to be back and talking with my colleagues once more. Friday, I was back outside creating a new flower bed to surround J’s favourite place to sit in the garden. Like Tuesday and Wednesday there were some interruptions during the day. It was a day punctuated by phone calls from prospective applicants for the two Non-Executive Director roles we currently have advertised. The whole week left me feeling very content and grateful for what I have and I’m able to do.

One consequence of this rather laid back week, however, has been the fact that I have barely done the reading I would normally do. I have steered clear of social media, and the only television I have watched has been when Ronnie O’Sullivan was playing snooker. That said, I did, thanks to Roy Lilly, read an old report published in early 2018 about Rwanda. The piece possibly caught my eye as it described the fate of asylum seekers from the African continent who made their way to Israel, only to be then ‘relocated’ to Rwanda to start a new life.

I was intrigued by the story, partly perhaps as I had just returned from Israel, and partly because the story appeared to be so similar to the dreadful proposals announced by our politicians as to how the UK were planning to deal with the numbers of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel to reach Britain. In the case of the Israeli migrants, they were all offered £3,000 and promised legal status and safety in Rwanda. The reality was rather different. Often the asylum seekers were allowed to stay in a hotel for up to 48 hours and then were pressurised to move on and out of the country, thus starting their refugee journey all over again. It was an inhuman policy on the part of both countries. Israel also paid the Rwanda government £4,000 for every asylum seeker sent to the country.

By 2018, some 20,000 refugees had been ‘relocated’ to Rwanda – do the arithmetic; it’s a lot of money being spent that brought nothing but misery for so many people. Those that stayed there didn’t get status, can’t get employment and very much live day-by-day with great insecurity. Interestingly, many asylum seekers still in Israel would rather stay there even if it meant being detained in the infamous Israeli prisons in the inhospitable Negev desert. I say interesting, as there were reports in some of yesterday’s papers of asylum seekers in Calais who stated that they would rather stay in the camps there or risk going to prison here rather than being ‘relocated’ to Rwanda.

It is not just the UK that has these plans. Denmark is pursuing a similar policy, also with Rwanda. Australia has long attracted criticism for its policy of holding asylum seekers in both Papua New Guinea and the offshore Manus Island – both places are renowned for poor living conditions. Thankfully, this year Australia has struck a deal with the New Zealand government to offer New Zealand as a final home for asylum seekers.

The British proposal seems fraught with difficulties. Rwanda is not known for its promotion of human rights. Unsurprisingly, despite our Prime Minister’s government saying last year that Rwanda continued to restrict civil and political freedoms and continues to clamp down on media freedoms, last week Johnson described Rwanda as being one of the safest countries in the world. I don’t know what it must be like to feel compelled to leave one’s home and travel sometimes thousands of miles to seek a better, safer and more prosperous life. 

We are perhaps beginning to get a glimpse of what such a situation might feel like through the reports of those displaced and caught up in the atrocious war in Ukraine. As I write this, the war has been going on for 59 days. I cannot imagine what each of these days will have felt like to the families of those caught up in the conflict.

I do know that when I read of these events, it reinforces my sense of no longer taking everything for granted. I am very grateful for the freedoms I enjoy every day. Being able to spend my Easter weekend with family in celebration and happiness was truly wonderful. Of course, I acknowledge the growing numbers of people in the UK who are now really struggling to have lives that have meaning, where they can feed themselves and their families and pay their rent and fuel bills. Collectively we must continue to find ways of supporting each other. We need to be there for each other, to truly value everyone no matter their background or status and cherish the unique contribution each and every one of us can make to our communities.

Perhaps we should consider that, even as we see things start to get tougher in the UK, many of us remain in a much better place than those seeking asylum or who have been displaced from their homes by conflicts. I believe we should continue to try and help them find a pathway to a better life. Sending folk to Rwanda is not the way to do this. As one of my grandchildren said last week, ‘the worlds your lobster’ – I’m not sure where in his 10 years of life he heard that phrase, although he did understand the need for us all to find ways of changing and adapting when things that are very familiar to us suddenly disappear or are lost.